The Obama Administration has brought increased attention to community colleges as institutions that will help the nation once again become a world leader in postsecondary degree attainment. Billions of dollars in new funding are being proposed as a means to improve graduation rates and other student outcomes across the nation’s community colleges.

But there is widespread recognition that the current means of measuring and accounting for outcomes in community colleges is deficient. Among the weaknesses of current systems is an under-emphasis on the reporting of intermediate outcomes that students achieve along the way to completion. Understanding the patterns by which students make, or fail to make, progress toward completion is vital to the national mobilization to improve student outcomes. The more that is understood about what helps students make forward progress and where that progress typically stalls, the greater the chances of reaching these lofty but essential national goals.

This report offers a framework for guiding educators in using available knowledge and tools to improve student outcomes. It shows how better use of available data can help diagnose why students fail to make progress toward a degree and can better demonstrate the progress students make along the pathway to a degree. The framework consists of two factors: milestones, or intermediate educational achievements that students reach along the path to degree completion, and indicators of success, or academic patterns students follow including remediation, gateway courses, and credit accumulation, that have been demonstrated in research studies to correlate with forward progress and completion.

Data to demonstrate the value of the framework are from the California Community Colleges (CCC). These 110 colleges are key to the future social and economic health of California as well as to the success of national efforts to restore America’s position among nations. The demand for college-educated workers in California is projected to greatly exceed the supply. The state’s community colleges play a vital role in meeting the demand for workers as they are the primary producers of postsecondary certificates and associate degrees and help produce bachelor’s degrees through the transfer process.

We show how the framework can be applied to:

• analyze student achievement of various milestones, by subgroup
• identify where student progress gets stalled on the path toward a degree
• analyze enrollment patterns to diagnose why students fail to make progress
• draw connections between campus or system policies and the patterns revealed by the analyses, in order to suggest changes that would foster better student outcomes.

The framework also provides a means of improving accountability by including measures that demonstrate the progress students are making along the pathway to college completion. This is important given the challenges of identifying students’ goals and the many obstacles that community college students face on the road to completion of an academic program. Our analysis shows that too few students reach each of the milestones along the path to degree completion, especially older students, part-time students, and black and Latino students. Data also show that students who complete college-level math and English within the first two years of enrollment, complete at least 20 credits in the first year of enrollment, take summer courses, complete at least 80% of the courses in which they enroll, register for courses on time, and/or attend full time are more likely to complete than students who do not follow these patterns.

via Institute for Higher Education Leadership & Policy | Download the Full Report

college completion community colleges Institute for Higher Education Leadership & Policy outcomes